A New Life for Waste Plastics

Biologics manufacturing involves plastics that can be challenging to recycle using conventional recycling services, such as gloves, tubing, filters, pipette tips and plastic drums.

In 2015, Amgen’s manufacturing facility in Rhode Island worked with a waste processing service to begin sending these plastics to a special facility where they could be processed into pellets that are used to make products such as curb material, pallets and park benches. Staff who felt passionately about reducing this waste stream advocated for this program as the right thing to do and Amgen leadership agreed, even though there are costs to Amgen for this processing service.

Overall, this program, in place at three of our sites, diverted 468 MT of these plastics from the landfill and repurposed them for industrial uses in 2018, including use in the fabrication of benches installed at Amgen.  

“We are proud to have been able to propose and implement a solution that helps promote environmental protection,” said Jim Rawley, Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability manager. “Recycling these plastics helps reduce the amount of raw material used in certain products and reduces plastics in our waste stream.”